Not so long ago, Australia's richest man came perilously close to meeting his maker. But when Kerry Packer was quizzed as to whether he'd had a classical "near death experience" floating out of his body, moving towards the light and so on, he reportedly told those close to him not to fool themselves because there was nothing out there. Cold comfort for the Packers perhaps, but now the results of a year-long scientific study of heart attack survivors in the cardiac unit of Southampton General Hospital are about to be published. A team led by one of Britain's leading neuropsychiatrists, Dr Peter Fenwick interviewed people who'd literally been brought back from the dead as soon as they were able to speak. What they found surprised even hard headed scientists on the team. A significant number of people recalled remarkable experiences even after their brains were considered dead.

---------Compere: Tony JonesReporter: Tony Jones

TONY JONES: Dr Peter Fenwick, it's often said that people who go through the near-death phenomenon have common experiences.

Did your study bear that out?

DR PETER FENWICK, NEUROPSYCHIATRIST: Oh, absolutely.

They all had core experiences.

The usual things of peace and calm, going down the tunnel, meeting a being of light, going into a garden.

One had a life review and then a decision to come back.

TONY JONES: What is a life review?

Because this has also been reported in other cases in the anecdotal evidence, at least.

Does that mean that people are asked or asking themselves to look back at their whole lives?

DR PETER FENWICK: Yes, I'm not sure that they can do it voluntarily and I've never heard anybody ask for it.

What they are is they're shown their whole life.

You must remember that at this point in the experience you are surrounded by universal love, so imagine yourself standing surrounded by universal love and then seeing your life flash before you and you make a judgment on your own actions.

It's a very moral experience.

TONY JONES: And a very subjective one, too.

How can you apply any kind of scientific criterion to those sort of experiences?

DR PETER FENWICK: Oh, absolutely.

That is the question.

How can we show first of all that they occur and if they occur, why they occur.

Well, that's why we did it in a coronary care unit, because remember what happens when you have a heart attack.

You lose consciousness immediately.

Then there's a period when you're unconscious and you recover consciousness slowly.

Also when you are fully unconscious, you show the signs of clinical death which is no respiration, no cardiac output, fully dilated pupils showing that your brain stem is not functioning and that is the clinical criteria of death.

So, our question was -- if people have these experiences, when do they have them?

Now, they couldn't have them as they are going down, because we know from the way you lose consciousness, that the memory circuits all go immediately.

And so, it couldn't be as you go down, so could it be as you come back?

The answer to that is that if you come round from an anoxic episode like that, then it's confusional, so you get no clarity in your experiences.

So, we were left then with the only other alternative and that is that they actually occurred during the episode itself and that is a difficult one because neuroscience would say it wasn't possible.

TONY JONES: Because you're saying effectively that people are having an experience while their brain is dead, while they're effectively dead?

DR PETER FENWICK: Absolutely, absolutely.

People have put --

TONY JONES: Where does that lead us then?

Are you concluding from that, does your scientific study if you like, conclude that there is a fundamental separation between the organic thing which is the brain, the machine of the brain and the individual consciousness that inhabits it?

DR PETER FENWICK: It's too early to say that.

There are pointers in that direction.

In the anecdotal accounts you get out of body experiences and there is now a wealth of evidence showing that people seem to be able to get information that they couldn't have got just lying unconscious on the floor.

In other words, they know what's going on around them in a way which is very detailed and suggests that the mind may have separated from the brain.

But it's a long way from saying that we're actually certain that's what happens, because one possibility about the near-death experience is that looking back on the experience in some strange way, looking back on the period of unconsciousness, you see these experiences in the brain.

Now I don't really understand what that means yet, but that's a possibility.

So, two possibilities.

One is that mind and brain are not the same thing and the other is that it's a sort of quirk of looking back.

TONY JONES: If it were the former, if the mind and the brain are different things, would you conclude from that that such a thing as the human soul might be proven to exist?

DR PETER FENWICK: We'd be getting close to that.

Let me just say very rapidly that our science is a Galilean science.

That means that we see a dead objective outer world, you know, things in the world, and consciousness is created by the brain.

That's why neuroscience says you can't have mind and brain as dissimilar.

But that's an assumption of our science.

If you take a post-modern science then mind may be distributed and some of the very good work in parapsychology now suggests mind may not be limited to a brain.

So we may just have to update our image of mind.

Physicists have done it as far as matter which is distributed, so we may have to do it for mind.

TONY JONES: What do you feel, though, as a scientist coming across evidence that might lead you in the direction that there really is a separation between the two things?

I mean, does that make you as a scientist edge towards becoming more spiritual in your beliefs?

DR PETER FENWICK: I have spoken to now hundreds of people with near-death experiences and if I took their accounts literally, I'd become very much more spiritual and would also take very seriously the morality of the near-death experience which says that we are all responsible for our actions.

So, one would have to lead one's life that way.

TONY JONES: And you wouldn't take it further that there may be evidence here for a God, or a creative being of some sort?

DR PETER FENWICK: If one sticks with the data, then those people who go furtherest in the near-death experience talk about fusing with some universal consciousness.

So that's on the table.

Whether you're going to call the universal consciousness God or not I think is an open question.

But what they do argue is that the universe is intelligent and not dead.

TONY JONES: I presume you do expect that the extraordinary findings that you appear to be edging towards here -- and I appreciate you're hedging your bets somewhat, as a scientist would -- are going to get a certain amount of scientific scepticism.

There always has been, particularly about when these experiences are occurring.

How are you going to prove to scientists that the experiences are really occurring when the person is brain dead?

DR PETER FENWICK: Well, the first thing we need to do is we need other studies to back up our data.

So let's get a number of studies on the table that have found out the same sort of thing that we have.

Let's not make any assumptions until the data is there and clear.

Then we need a study in which we put EEG electrodes, measure the electrical activity of the brain and show, as we know now, that during a cardiac arrest there is no electrical activity.

And we need to do what was one of the key experiments and that is to look at people who say they leave their body and have targets in the room that only can be seen from the ceiling, which is where people usually report their viewpoint.

If they can see the targets and nobody in the room knows what they are, but yet they can bring back that information, then one has to seriously consider that brain and mind may be different things.

TONY JONES: Dr Peter Fenwick, we'll have to leave it there.

I'm sure there'll be no end of sources for funding for the rest of the research that you're talking about.